We invite you to a lecture (in English) by Dr. Sergei A. Mudrov entitled “Restructuring Church-State and Inter-Orthodox Relations: Ukraine’s Law 3894-IX and Its Impact on the Orthodox Church”, which will take place on Tuesday, June 10, 2025, at 1:30 PM at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Jaracza 1, 5th floor), as well as online via the Zoom platform. The link is available through the secretariat: sekretariat@ispan.edu.pl.

The event will serve as a summary of Dr. Mudrov’s research project carried out at the Institute of Slavic Studies PAS, entitled “Church-State Relations in the Post-Communist World: the Cases of Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine.”

The meeting will be led by Prof. Alena Rudenka.

Description:

On August 20, 2024, the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) adopted Law No. 3894-IX, which laid the groundwork for the banning of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC)—the largest religious denomination in Ukraine. This decision was the culmination of a series of steps taken by Ukrainian authorities following the victory of the Euromaidan in 2014. These steps included support for the transfer of UOC parishes to other Orthodox jurisdictions, the adoption of legislation aimed at renaming the UOC, and the exclusion of the Church from participation in the Armed Forces.

The marginalization of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church intensified significantly after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. The impact of the war can even be seen as a decisive factor in paving the way for the potential complete removal of the UOC’s structures from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

In this paper, I will examine the key factors that contributed to the Ukrainian authorities’ decision in August 2024. I will assess how the status of the UOC and public attitudes toward the Church have evolved over the past decade, following the Euromaidan revolution in 2014. This analysis will take into account the increasing dominance of nation-state policies in Ukraine, which have largely replaced alternative state-nation approaches. Additionally, I will analyze the content of Law No. 3894, paying particular attention to its vague provisions and the challenges posed by its ambiguous interpretations.

The project is funded by a grant from the European Commission (No. NDICI-GEO-NEAR_2022_434-092-0029).

We invite you to a scientific seminar organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw and the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The event will take place on May 21, 2025 at 10:30 a.m. at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw (Warsaw, Żurawia 4, room 108).

During the meeting, anthropologist Jane K. Cowan (University of Sussex) will give a lecture entitled “Tracking Claims for Macedonia between Field and Archive, Present and Past: Methodological Reflections from an Anthropologist in the Archives”.

The seminar will be held in English.

Live streaming will be available on the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtU-Bl_H13aial5u-nF4eCw?app=desktop

Description:

Starting in 1983, I carried out anthropological research on the performance of gender in social dancing in the small market town of Sohos in the contested region of Macedonia that became part of Greece’s “New Lands” in 1912. The majority of Sohoians were Greek-identified but bilingual (currently Greek-speaking but in the past, primarily speakers of a Bulgarian dialect). Over the twentieth century, the complicated position of such “ambiguous” persons within dominant national narratives of Greece’s ethnic “homogeneity” had given rise to trauma, silenced histories, accommodations and new identifications. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the region saw the re-emergence of claims for Macedonian minority rights and recognition. Yet most Sohoians distanced themselves from such claims, insisting “we are not a minority!” Discussing with a Greek historian the historical formation of Sohoian identities in this post-Ottoman, now Greek border region, he suggested that I visit the League of Nations Archives in Geneva: there, I might discover whether any Sohoian families had participated in the “voluntary and reciprocal” emigration agreed between Greece and Bulgaria at Neuilly in 1919. After two weeks in the archives in September 1996, I developed a research project that grappled with Western Europeans’ involvement in the formulation of new ‘regimes of difference’ within Balkan and East European states and in the international supervision of the minorities treaties those “Minority States” had been compelled to sign, as well as the responses of minorities and their champions through petitions.

In this presentation, I will speak as “an anthropologist in the archives”: tracing my research trajectory to the archives and describing what I “saw” there with my anthropologically-trained eyes. As in ethnographic fieldwork, my archival research started with some well-developed theoretical questions, then proceeded with a willingness to be diverted if the empirical data “surprised” me. The latest phase of my research was prompted by such a surprise, when I found a file of petitions revealing collaborations between Bulgarian and international women’s organisations regarding demands for protections for Macedonian minorities. That led me to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) archives; I am currently exploring interwar collaborations—variably friendly, fraught and conflictual– between mostly North European and North American WILPF activists and the female leadership of women’s organizations in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece, particularly around questions of minorities and Macedonia. My talk will explore the role of serendipity, surprises and the importance of following the question(s), and the evidence, wherever they lead, moving (when necessary) between the field and the archive.

Biography:

Jane K. Cowan is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Sussex. A specialist of Greece, Cowan’s early work investigated gender, dance, sociability and embodiment, based on fieldwork in northern Greece. Since the late 1990s, with a focus on the region and “question” of Macedonia, she has explored the nexus of rights claiming and international supervision. Her work spans investigations of minority petitioning to the League of Nations’ Minorities Section and, with Julie Billaud, contemporary human rights auditing at the Universal Periodic Review. Most recently, she is researching the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF): specifically, transnational collaborations between WILPF and leaders of women’s organizations in the Balkans concerning minorities and the Macedonian Question. She recently completed her term as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (2022 –2024).

Join us for the International Lecture Series on Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies, a collaborative initiative between Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Vision Ukraine Netzwerk: Bildung, Sprache und Migration, and the UCL Ukrainian Society. This exciting series brings together Ukrainian and international scholars for insightful discussions on a wide range of topics related to Ukrainian culture, history, and society.

The lecture series is open to a broad spectrum of participants, including researchers, university academics, and students at all levels from Ukraine, Europe and beyond, fostering an inclusive and interdisciplinary dialogue within the field of Ukrainian Studies.

Sessions will be held twice weekly in the evening via Zoom platform (starting at 6:00 PM Polish time) from January 29th to March 1st, 2025.

All sessions will be conducted in English, and participation is free of charge.

Successful completion of the program will grant participants an electronic certificate of participation.

Applications for participation are open until January 23rd, 2025.

To register, please fill in the form under the following link: https://forms.gle/6evnj7wyAgn8ou4X9

From the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a lecture entitled “Decolonial Content on Ukrainian YouTube: Revealing “kakaya raznitsa” and Blurring Cultural Boundaries with Russia” will be given by dr. Olha Tkachenko on February 21, 2025.

The entire program of the Lecture Series can be found at the link.